AVADirect X79 Gaming PC, Tri-SLI GeForce GTX 680

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Gaming Performance: Lost Planet 2, Dirt 3, and Aliens vs Predator

Lost Planet 2

DX11 Gaming Performance

Lost Planet 2

A follow-up to Capcom’s Lost Planet : Extreme Condition, Lost Planet 2 is a third person shooter that takes place again on E.D.N. III ten years after the story line of the first title. We ran the game’s DX11 mode which makes heavy use of DX11 Tessellation and Displacement mapping and soft shadows. There are also areas of the game that make use of DX11 DirectCompute for things like wave simulation in areas with water. This is one game engine that looks significantly different in DX11 mode when you compare certain environmental elements and character rendering in its DX9 mode versus DX11. We used the Test B option built into the benchmark tool and with all graphics options set to their High Quality values.

Lost Planet 2 is a title that can really expose single videocard setups at higher resolutions, particularly ones wielding lower end GPUs. To wit, it takes three Kepler cards to break 100fps, whereas a single Kepler graphics card is going to yield around 50-55fps on a similar testbed.

Dirt 3

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Dirt 3

Dirt 3 is the latest in a string of great racing games from Codemasters. Like is predecessor, 2009's Dirt 2, this game sports impressive visuals with DX11 support. “Ultra” settings for shadow effects, tessellation, and post processing elements, like depth of field, then become available to the gamer, and in turn, crank up the workload on the graphics subsystem. The game engine also makes use of multi-core processors for higher performance on top-end systems. We tested the game configured with its Ultra graphics options with 4X anti-aliasing at resolutions with of 1920x1200 and 2560x1600.

Dirt 3 is another title that scales fairly well with multiple graphics cards. When we initially reviewed NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 graphics card (on a different testbed), we recorded 71.67fps at a 2560x1600 screen resolution using the same visual quality settings. By adding two more videocards, we're able to bump performance by over 100fps, which isn't quite a three-fold increase, but few games are able take full advantage of extra GPUs at a 1:1 ratio.

Alien vs. Predator

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Alien vs. Predator

The Alien vs. Predator benchmark makes use of the advanced Tessellation, screen space ambient occlusion and high-quality shadow features, available with DirectX 11. In addition to enabling all of the aforementioned DirectX 11 related features offered by this benchmark, we also switched on 4X anti-aliasing along with 16X anisotropic filtering to more heavily tax the graphics cards being tested.

AMD-based graphics cards seem to fare better in Aliens vs Predator than NVIDIA hardware, and it was the only benchmark where AMD's Radeon HD 7970 outperformed the GeForce GTX 680 in our Kepler review. We're talking small victories, however, and what's more, this is one of the few titles that scale at almost a 1:1 ratio when adding additional graphics cards. Here AVADirect was able to muster nearly 91fps with three Kepler cards, compared to 31.7fps for a single graphics (again, the latter is using a different testbed, albeit a similar one with the same processor, same amount and speed of RAM, and the same X79 chipset).